It'll be another ceremony. A parade of metal and glass. A celebration of our supposed progress. Another device for consumption. A window into a walled world. Another false need. Another life not really improved despite their insistence that it is
Please at least spare a thought for those around the world who are too busy trying to stay alive on this day to worry about a new monolith to worship.
Psychs (both types) who are funded by medical insurance are the issue. They're being effectively paid commission from the insurer to find anything that could be wrong with you so they can eat. The moment you get sick in the US, you are a landgrab for cash. It's just wrong.
Here in the UK, the free ones on the NHS are pretty good! If you don't want treatment, noone is going to lose any money (in fact they're saving cash) so you're fine.
Well actually, I reckon yes. Much to my parents' latent terror (I didn't tell them until they came back from holiday), at the age of 15 a friend and myself built a small blast furnace using some ceramic pots, bits of stone lying around and a hoover. I managed to get 50g of what looked like pig iron out of that bugger before it basically fell to bits and set fire to the lawn. That was from about 2kg of ore I found at the bottom of a cliff face next to a beach at Skegness. Was great fun! (flux was limestone from the shed, coke was 3 large bags of barbeque charcoal)
I'm sure that and the rest of the process wasn't beyond people with a higher budget and requirements...
As for plants - it's all knowledge and experience. There is no abstraction. Eat this, don't eat that. I grow quite a few edible plants myself and there is little abstraction.
Semantically speaking, understanding is simply knowing enough to recreate something, preferably with your own aquired skills and knowledge. We're all just fancy parrots wrapped up in monkey bodies.
To be honest, the bedrock abstraction should stop at "what humans can realistically create with their own hands from nothing". You can make your own transistor quite easily and Ebers-Moll provides a nice set of rules to work with.
The quantum physicists and philosophers can remain arguing about technicalities then and let the rest of the world observe, understand and create.
It doesn't get us anything at all other than a fucking huge rabbit hole to stare down every time you do anything. Lets look at a pretty naff case for .Net CLR on x86 for windows workflow:
application -> xaml -> framework -> server -> container -> c# -> cil -> bytecode -> x86 instructions -> microcode.
Now forth on a 68000:
Forth screen -> 68k instructions
To be honest, for what I consider to be life and death stuff, a 10MHz 68000 is good enough (I have one in my TI92 calculator).
Not until the printers can make their own CPUs and complex parts such as threaded rods. That is a long time off.
3d printers are supposedly promoted as printing themselves i.e. as self-replicating. They are not. They print a small fraction of their own non-complex parts.
I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly).
They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines.
I (the parent of your post) actually have a BBC Master (and the advanced reference manuals) lying around still for precisely that reason. It's quite a handy and very powerful little machine to be honest.
A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate.
To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with integrated circuits inside them (before 1970) and complexity rocketed logarithmically. It died doubly so the moment that electrical engineering and the practical side of computer science diverged into "them" and "us".
If you want to use something which you understand, you will probably need to buy a crate of transistors, resistors and diodes and wirewrap yourself an entire computer from scratch PDP-7 style.
This fact is a warning: We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided. One day we will never hope to comprehend anything in a lifetime.
Tell me which bit of my post was not factual?